Ambiguities in range and/or Doppler are typically inherent in a returning radar signal. Also, the radar environment may contain spurious range and range rate measurements due to Enemy Countermeasures (ECM) and/or spurious range rate measurements due to Jet Engine Modulation (JEM). In order to resolve signal processing ambiguities, a standard approach is to transmit multiple radar waveforms (multiple pulse repetition frequency or PRF) during a given dwell.
A major classification of waveforms deals with ambiguity resolution in range and Doppler. Low-PRF waveforms are generally unambiguous in range but ambiguous in Doppler, medium-PRF waveforms are ambiguous in both range and Doppler, and high-PRF waveforms are ambiguous in range but unambiguous in Doppler. Previous techniques, such as the Chinese Remainder Theorem, the Hovanessian algorithm, and clustering algorithms, have been developed for resolving the range and Doppler ambiguities of a single target for both medium-PRF and high-PRF waveforms. However, each of these conventional approaches can result in intensive radar processing per dwell and inefficient allocation of radar resources. As such, improved methods for resolving radar ambiguities are needed.